Versent CEO, Thor Essman
The demand to move to the cloud for energy giant Woodside was driven by a couple of main points – to speed up the time to process and interpret large seismic data sets, and providing analysis.
And to help achieve this, AWS premier consulting partner Versent was brought on-board to guide them through and map out their cloud journey.
Through this partnership many aspects were brought to the fore including the need for an enterprise-grade, native cloud (ENC) platform.
But to get to this stage, Versent firstly provided a detailed analysis, to which it dubbed ‘Yellow Brick Road’ of Woodside’s on-premises infrastructure involving a customised plan to build the ENC.
Once this task was undertaken, the next step involved migrating and transforming Woodside’s existing data and applications.
In order to help deliver on this project, Versent had people on the ground in Perth, Sydney and Melbourne. Part of it also involved the use of Versent’s software-as-a-service tool called Stax, which provides customers with insights into their cloud usage, cost, risk, wastage, compliance and security.
As a result of making seismic data available on the cloud platform, it has changed the way Woodside loads, processes, interprets and runs simulations, which can now be completed within weeks instead of months and years, Woodside strategic technology manager Cameron Robertson said.
Since the AWS implementation took place, Woodside initially anticipated it would have 15 AWS accounts in their cloud platform by the end of 2018, but this has grown much quicker than originally anticipated, with the platform now catering to more than 100 accounts globally, providing hubs for technology servicing international offices and business.
“We are just at the start of our journey, really feeling the value unleashing itself - now we can support our international offices, we are multi-region, all from this new platform,” Woodside digital strategy and capability manager Vilma Faoro said.
Versent CEO Thor Essman said Woodside had been a client for more than a year, with the relationship moving through the paces and now looking to progress into other areas of the business from on-premises to the cloud.
“We’ll be looking at getting them further into the data space and other areas of their business such as geoscience, and consider helping them to move the rest of what they have on-premises, and into cloud,” he said.
“As many clients start early into AWS, and do they best with what they know, we just help supercharge them to reconstitute some of their foundations with what we call a native cloud structure and help uplift some of the automation inside their amazing data and analytics environments.
“It’s been fascinating to watch the transformation of Woodside through that and also what that means for Perth
– showing what can be done with a mix sourced team. It opens up an interesting paradigm, rather than outsourcing and offshoring, you can partner and near-shore.”
Versent currently counts up to five competencies within AWS, and two in Stax. This includes MSP, DevOps, migration, solution provider and security.
Versent is also set to continue upon its expansion into other markets after opening offices in Denver US and Singapore, with its sights firmly set on Germany and the UK.
“It’s a different business to what it was a year ago, and it’s going to be an interesting year ahead for us,” Essman said.
“We continue to grow 35 per cent year-on-year, we’re really finding the sweet spot of the balance of our business and we’re seeing both managed services, and our data business take over in growth.
“We’ll be shifting a bit into product, but we’re also shifting into data in a much bigger way.”
